Bantu Expansion Across Africa

The Bantu languages today number more than 500 living members, spoken by upward of 500 million people across most of sub-Saharan Africa south of a line running roughly from Cameroon to Kenya. Linguist Joseph Greenberg, in The Languages of Africa (1963), classified Bantu as a branch within the wider Niger-Congo family, specifically nested inside its Benue-Congo subgroup. Malcolm Guthrie had earlier undertaken comparative reconstruction of proto-Bantu vocabulary, work culminating in his four-volume Comparative Bantu (1967-1971), building on his own initial 1948 classification; this comparative method situates the Bantu linguistic homeland in the borderland region between modern Cameroon and Nigeria, an area sometimes called the Grassfields or Cross River zone.